Rodney A. Brooks is Director of the 230 person MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and is the Fujitsu Professor of Computer Science. He is also Chairman and Chief Technical Officer of 125 person iRobot Corp. He received degrees in pure mathematics from the Flinders University of South Australia and the Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1981. He developed the behavior-based approach to mobile robots which iRobot Corp is now commercializing. During the last decade he has concentrated at MIT on humanoid robots and social interactions. His new research projects are aimed at building "living machines", machines whose natural description will be that they are alive in the same sense as animals or plants.

Rodney, with his reasearch group, was also featured in the Errol Morris film "Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control."

http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/brooks
http://www.irobot.com